Ford and McDonald's team up to make car parts from food waste

Recently, according to foreign media reports, Ford Motor Company announced a partnership with McDonald's USA to use coffee beans, the raw material of people's familiar daily breakfast drink coffee, in parts such as the car's headlight housing to inject "caffeine" into the car, thereby doing its part to combat climate change.

Ford said it will take food waste from fast food giant McDonald's and divert it from landfills to labs where it will be made into bioplastics. In addition to reducing food waste, the effort will make auto parts lighter, use less oil and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Currently, the automotive industry is facing tremendous pressure to reduce tailpipe emissions and increase the production of electric vehicles. Data shows that more than a quarter of carbon emissions come from the transportation sector. In July this year, Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW issued a joint statement, promising to produce more efficient and cleaner cars than the Trump administration requires in the next seven years.

The effort to turn the dried skins of coffee beans that fall off during the roasting process into auto parts is relatively small by comparison, but Ford still hopes the move will bolster its environmental bona fides.

Millions of pounds of coffee chaff — the dried skins that naturally fall off coffee beans during the roasting process — are turned into garden mulch or charcoal in North America every year, and together Ford and McDonald’s could come up with an innovative approach for the material.

Ford's collaboration with McDonald's demonstrates both companies' commitment to innovative approaches to products and environmental stewardship, and the project also includes Varroc Lighting Systems and Competitive Green Technologies, which are responsible for providing automotive headlights and coffee bean silver skin processors, respectively. The two companies have found that coffee bean skins can be transformed into durable materials to strengthen certain vehicle parts. By heating the bean skins to high temperatures in low oxygen, mixing them with plastics and other additives, and then making them into pellets, the material can be formed into a variety of shapes.

The coffee bean skin composite meets the quality requirements of many automotive parts, such as headlamp housings, other interior and under-hood parts. Parts made with this material are about 20% lighter than current parts and require about 25% less energy during the molding process. Ford also claims that the thermal performance of parts made from coffee bean skin material is significantly better than current materials.

Ford has set itself a goal to use only recycled and renewable plastics in its global automotive product line.